SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

In mol araan

There is a really good bilingual food blog called In Mol Araan, which I have mentioned before. It's in Yiddish and English. In mol araan is a great name for a food blog -- it means "into the mouth." It might be a quotation or phrase but I don't recognise it. The subtitle is a blogele vegn essn un verten, which is "a bloglet about food and words."

I was just showing Kathy, because today there was a post about a delicious looking chocolate kernik, which is a sort of vegan cheesecake-analogue dessert. Vegan desserts are an important part of kosher cuisine, because the rules forbid combining dairy and meat ingredients in the same meal. If you have a meaty first course, dairy desserts are out.

I was explaining to Kathy about how Yiddish is written, and for an example pointed to the author's brief description. She is the mysterious (and culinarily-gifted) Chocolate Lady.

In Yiddish, the Chocolate Lady styles herself מרת שאקאלאד, and I wanted to translate this. My Yiddish reading skills are appalling: I have to read the letters one by one and then figure the word out. That's pretty tricky for me because my Yiddish vocabulary is fairly small, some Hebrew letters (which are all consonants, don't ask) get repurposed as vowels, and then there are a lot Hebrew-origin words which aren't written with vowels at all (don't ask).

So I read שאקאלאד -- that's SH-A-K-A-L-A-T, clearly chocolate. But the first word (we read right to left) is mem-resh-sof, M-R-S. What could that be? I don't know any Yiddish or Hebrew words that would fit... I guess MaRaT is a Hebrew first name if we read tof instead of sof... nah...